About Me

My life was described by one of my editors as “impossibly exotic” – although really it was not my life, but me, that was the exotic, the uprooted plant, the one who didn’t belong, always living in someone else’s backyard...
Now I am back in Australia, the returning native learning to live where I was born. Writer, traveler, environmentalist. Author of The Isles of Glory trilogy (The Aware, Gilfeather, The Tainted); The Mirage Makers trilogy (Heart of the Mirage, Shadow of Tyr, Song of the Shiver Barrens); The Stormlord trilogy The Last Stormlord, Stormlord Rising, Stormlord's Exile, and writing as Glenda Noramly, a stand-alone book Havenstar. LATEST:
THE FORSAKEN LANDS
A clash of cultures and magic as traders and buccaneers hunt for spices and wealth in the Va-forsaken half of the world ... even as the unidentified darkness of plague and murder stalks their own land.
THE LASCAR'S DAGGER and THE DAGGER'S PATH available worldwide now! Final book, THE FALL OF THE DAGGER out mid-April.

Monday, September 10, 2007

Not noramlyed once!

If you discount the general horrors of two days travelling, eating plane food, without sleep, it was a pretty good trip.

I didn't lose anything. Planes were on time. No connections missed. I discovered that there is such a thing as an electric hand blowdryer that actually dries your hands. They have them in Narita airport Japan. Mind you, they have the same effect on your skin as jumping out of an aeroplane at 10,000 feet and free falling a few thousand feet... (Ever seen those photos of naked skydivers? If not, don't go looking. Not a pretty sight.)

And the weather over North America was so clear we had a spectacular sightseeing trip. Leaving Washington D.C. behind, we headed north over the Great Lakes and into Canada, across Hudson Bay (definitely a first for me) and then skirted the Arctic Sea. I have never seen so many lakes in all my life, as if this end of the continent is sinking under the summer-melt. Thin threads of dry wend aimless paths through a watery barren landscape. No mark of mankind, not here. No roads, no towns, no ports, no smoke. No footprint of destruction, except that left - possibly - by our power to warm, so wantonly, a globe floating in the cold of space.

This was a land seamlessly becoming a northern sea, or a sea insinuating curving fingers and sinuous arms into a flat expanse of taiga, tundra - call it what you will. For hour upon hour, until the land gradually lifted itself up out of the water into rugged ranges of iron-mauve, capped with blue-grey peaks. No snow in this early September weather, no trees ever, no roads or pipelines - yet. It could have been Mars, raw and beautiful and forbidding.

Alas, as northern Canada switched to the the rough scouring ranges of northern Alaska, the clouds came down, and I saw no more.

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Awards

BEST FANTASY NOVEL OF THE YEAR Shortlisted Finalist2003: for The Aware; 2004: for The Tainted; 2006: for Heart of the Mirage; 2007: for The Song of the Shiver Barrens; 2009: for The Last Stormlord 2010: for Stormlord Rising 2011: for Stormlord's Exile 2014: The Lascar's Dagger 2015: The Dagger's Path 2016: The Fall of the Dagger